I went with these guys http://www.nativespace.co.uk/ very cheap, truly fabulous support and oscommerce installed as standard. Wouldnt change from them for the world after fighting with other options for a while last year

As Sally has noted, it's not a bad deal with that host, especially as they set up a choice of alternative stores.

A lot depends on your ability with manageing a website as to actual shopping cart you use. Any hosting site with a mysql database will allow you to install one of the open souce shopping carts. eg. Zencart, OsCommerce, Cubecart etc, plus the slightly more basic ones available with the opensouce CMS systems like Mambo, Joomla, Nuke and its derivatives.

Part of the problem and the expense comes with integrating credit cards within your shopping cart. Paypal is usually the cheapest to initially set up, but takes a slightly larger slice than the more bank orientated ones such as WorldPay etc. These involve getting a trading account with them to recieve credit-card payments which then transfer to your main bank account after a set period.

Another aspect that does need considering is the provision of SSL certificate, especially with credit card transactions. These cost about £50 to £150 a year on Sally's host, which can be more than some other hosting providers, but you save on the costs with the website. A dedicated SSL on other hosts can cost about £40

Some hosts offer an integrated e-commerce system with their hosting, often based on a derivative of a commercial shopping cart package, usually with the SSl included, but your paying for this priveledge as part of the package. Usual figures are between £15 and £50 month on average, depending on the number of products

Mostly it depends on your skills html and php etc. The more you have, the easier it is to find a cheaper way.

A couple of alternatives are 1and1, Fasthosts, Webfusion etc, but it's definately worth looking around to see exactly what they are offering.

I think there was a topic on here about e-commerce hosting recently, where a number of traders recommended a few of their hosting companies.